Serious archaeology

I took my first degree at UCL Institute of Archaeology (then an independent institute), and worked for a PhD there: I didn’t complete it, but did publish the results in some detail. In 1979 I moved from London to Wiltshire to be curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury. While at the museum I directed small excavations at both Avebury and Stonehenge, and years later another dig at Avebury when I was writing Hengeworld (it was also then that I found the “lost” hoard of ancient human remains in the London Natural History Museum, including the skeleton of a beheaded Anglo-Saxon man from Stonehenge and Avebury’s “barber-surgeon” – all told in the book). Though I have worked primarily as a small publisher, restaurateur and journalist since leaving the museum in 1984, I continue to enjoy my own original archaeological research; editing British Archaeology allows me to keep up to date with what others are doing behind the scenes in the UK. I was part of the team that re-excavated Aubrey Hole 7 at Stonehenge in 2008, fulfilling a long ambition to see the human remains from the site properly studied and appreciated. In 2012 I initiated a new study of Hoa Hakananai’a, a large Easter Island statue in the British Museum, working with colleagues at Southampton University; peer-reviewed papers about this are being published in 2014.